“Varius? Really? Oof. Probably not too late to transfer. Or, you know, resign.”
Alfons raised an eyebrow at his friend Gerrik, who was peering over his shoulder at Alfons’s acceptance letter. The official golden seal of the Mage Council glittered at the bottom of the letter like an accolade, underscoring the details of his mentor assignment.
“There’s nothing wrong with Varius,” Alfons protested. “He’s trained some of the strongest mages of the last decade. They say he’s a genius.”
“They say he’s a pervert,” Gerrik corrected. “Even for a sex mage. For every ‘strong’ mage he’s trained, there are ten others that have quit magic altogether because of him.”
Alfons shrugged. He didn’t tell Gerrik that Varius had been his first choice. Gerrik was a food mage; he was never going to understand. Sex might be one of the most powerful of magical sources, but it was definitely the most ridiculed as well. “I’ll take my chances.”
Gerrik shrugged. “Your funeral, I guess. Let me know if you need me to stage a daring rescue or something.” Alfons snorted in reply, but Gerrik ignored it and threw an arm around his shoulder instead. “Come on!” he insisted, changing the subject, “We’re grads now! Let’s go out to dinner to celebrate! Next week we officially start our training as real mage-apprentices! This calls for fancy whiskey milkshakes!”
Alfons rolled his eyes, but let Gerrik tug him along in spite of his discomfort with the physical closeness of his friend. He’d tried and tried to explain to Gerrik why it was important to his magic that others not touch him, but Gerrik—though well-meaning—was a bit thick that way. It didn’t matter. As Gerrik had said, soon enough they would be off on their own assignments and studying to become true mages. The future spread itself out in front of them, tantalizing.
Alfons stared up at the imposing stone tower that would be his home for the next three years--or longer, depending on how long it took him to create his Masterwork. Some mages apprenticed for a decade or more, he knew, before becoming officially licensed to practice magic.
The building was old and looked like something out of a fairy tale. Most modern mages worked in standard government or office buildings, but for some reason most of those involved in teaching the profession still held on to the trappings of the past. Magic paid well enough that even teachers could afford an unnecessarily ominous estate or crumbling old castle to achieve the proper ambience. Alfons thought it was a bit showy, if he was being honest.
He looked down at his letter and then up at the building once more. The main house itself was not particularly ostentatious, but this was more than made up for by the enormous tower looming over it with its slit windows and purple-shingled roof. Unfortunately the letter didn’t say much about to whom he was supposed to report, or how to make himself known: only Varius’s address.
Alfons sighed and put down his suitcase so he could knock on the front door. Although not as showy as the tower, the main house was still quite big. Alfons wasn’t sure what he would do if no one heard him knock.
Thankfully the door was answered in short order by a plump, middle-aged woman in a maid’s uniform. She smiled warmly at him. “You must be Alfons, yes? Welcome.”
“Yes, that’s me,” Alfons acknowledged. He allowed her to grab the suitcase he had set down while he shouldered his duffle bag and backpack. “Pleased to be here,” he said politely.
“I’m Sophie,” the woman said as she led him through a comfortable-looking parlor. “I’m the master’s housekeeper, so if you need anything or if you have any questions, do let me know.” From the parlor they came into a grand marble entryway with rich red carpets lining the walkways and an enormous curved staircase leading to a balcony on the second floor. While Alfons took in his surroundings warily, Sophie tugged at the straps of his duffle and backpack until he let them drop to the floor.
“You leave those here, I’ll have someone take them to your room,” she said. “You’ll be just through that hallway and immediately on the right.” She gestured to an archway just to the right of the stairs. “But for now you should head up and see Master Varius. He’s waiting for you.” This time she indicated the staircase and the single door at the end of the second-floor balcony. “On with you now! Best not keep him waiting.”
Alfons took a deep breath and smiled at her, wanting to make a good impression. Then he turned to scale the wide stairs, listening to the echoing click of each footstep on the stone.
The room at the top of the stairs was an opulent, high-ceilinged study, oddly octagonal in shape and lined with bookshelves. A balcony, accessible only by ladder, ran along the walls, bisecting the room into a first and second floor. The high vantage point gazed down onto the open center of the space, which contained a work table, a desk, and several comfortable-looking sitting chairs. Closer to the edges of the study, tucked under the balcony, were a couch for lounging and a fireplace along the far wall.
Varius himself was seated in a high-backed chair facing the fireplace, his back to Alfons. When he heard the door open, he raised a hand in an impatient gesture.
“You must be the new boy, hm?” he said. His voice was heavily textured, and impatient. Alfons couldn’t tell if he had some kind of accent or just an odd method of enunciating. “Well, don’t just stand there, come here and let me have a look at you.”
Alfons approached the fireplace as instructed, coming to stand in front of his new mentor and bowing his head respectfully. When he straightened, he got his first look at the renowned Varius.
The man was not yet elderly, but old enough that visible white hair streaked back from his temples and some of the more prominent lines of his frown were becoming etched into his face with wrinkles. His face was long and angular—a bit too distinctive to be called handsome. The rest of his body was similarly lanky; sitting down in his chair he resembled nothing so much as a large spider biding its time in the middle of a web.
Varius looked him up and down, his expression unimpressed. He crooked a finger to gesture Alfons forward, until the boy was standing directly in front of him.
With astonishing speed for his old and wiry frame, Varius’s hand darted out like a snake and grabbed a hold of Alfons’s crotch, fondling it thoughtfully through his clothes.
“U-um!” Alfons could only stutter in surprise.
“What is the source of sex magic?” Varius asked sharply, ignoring Alfons’s discomfort.
Alfons swallowed. “Ch-chastity,” he recited, as his teachers had instructed him. “The magic is lost during orgasm, so the less often-”
“Wrong!” Varius spat. He gave Alfons’s trapped penis a vicious squeeze. “I can’t believe those old coots are still teaching that. Every one of you comes in here I have to break of that ridiculous notion. You think exercise mages practice their magic by not exerting their bodies? You think botany mages become powerful by never smelling a flower?” He scoffed.
“If there’s one thing I want you to learn from me boy, one thing to never forget, it’s this: sex magic isn’t chastity, it’s desire. The power of your desire is what fuels it. Learn to feel it, to nurture it. Every moment of your day, feel the want coursing through your blood, heating your skin. That’s what will make you a powerful mage.
“The institutions teach you chastity because they don’t want you to burn yourself out. Become complacent. The only way they know to control your desire is to tell you to not have orgasms. But true power is not in reserving yourself. True magic comes from understanding your own desires. Harnessing them and indulging yourself in them. Allowing yourself to become aroused by anything and everything, and drawing out that arousal until it suffuses you. Then bending that need to your will.”
“Nng,” was all Alfons could say as Varius maintained his grip on the young man’s genitals. He was certainly feeling something in his blood, all right.
“Nod your empty little head, boy, so I know you’re listening,” Varius growled. Alfons gritted his teeth and nodded.
Varius let go of him, apparently satisfied. But this reprieve was short-lived. “Take off your clothes and stand over on that carpet over there,” he instructed, gesturing towards the center of the room. Without sparing a further glance for Alfons, he lifted himself out of his chair and made his way over towards one of the walls of the room.
Alfons stood gaping at the man’s back, barely able to process what was happening. Was this really the great Varius that he’d heard stories about? The one who had personally trained Galiesh the Bold? The one whose name was cited on every third paper in magical academia?
The old man approached a section of bookshelf closed off by glass doors like a display case. He opened one of the doors and reached in to grab something. Turning back around, he scowled at Alfons, who had yet to move.
“Well, boy?” he snapped. “Are you here to learn or aren’t you?”
Alfons startled into action, striding towards the indicated rug in the center of the room. When he arrived, however, he hesitated, toying with the hem of his shirt. Sex magic was a very personal, very private thing. The body was supposed to be kept sacred and pristine, to ensure that your mind remained focused, or so he’d been taught. Alfons had been expected to practice all the theory he’d learned while at school, of course, but generally in the privacy of his own rooms, not-
“Boy, if you’re going to be shy about getting naked, this is going to take a very long time indeed,” Varius groused.
Feeling his face heating up, Alfons quickly stripped himself of his shirt and pants, trying not to think about it. When he was standing on the rug in his boxers, Varius raised an eyebrow at him.
“And the underwear too, boy, come on. What, do you want me to die of old age first?”
Alfons couldn’t look at Varius. He grabbed the waistband of his boxers and pulled them down quickly, staring straight ahead.
“Alright, let’s see what we’re working with here,” Varius muttered, stalking around him. One hand grabbed the flesh of Alfons’s ass and kneaded it thoughtfully. Then he came around front and lifted up Alfons’s penis for inspection.
“How old are you?” he asked.
“Twenty-two, Sir,” Alfons gritted out.
“Hmm,” said Varius. He gave the penis in his hand a gentle tug. “Well-endowed enough,” he muttered. “Circumcised. Shame. What world are we living in where parents still mutilate their children in such a way? Feh. No matter.”
Holding Alfons’s penis out, Varius reached forward with his other hand. Alfons hardly noticed until he felt the squeeze of a tight band around the base of his cock and balls. He yelped at the unexpected sensation, unsure how Varius had gotten it onto him so quickly. When he looked down at the band, Alfons saw that it was no ordinary cock-ring.
The ring encasing his genitals looked as though it was made of gold, although that couldn’t possibly be the case, since Varius must have stretched it to get it around him. The surface shimmered and animated with strange runes made of light that seemed to fade in and out of the material. Something about this object was magical, although Alfons could not have said what it did just by looking.
“Alright then,” said Varius in a business-like tone of voice. He reached over to his nearby work table and grabbed a small squeeze bottle of lube, which he set down on the floor by Alfons’s feet.
“Now,” the mage instructed, “get down on all fours. Let’s see what you’re capable of, pleasure-wise. Use the lube. I want you to get yourself hard and prepare your hole at the same time. Do not come.”
Alfons stared at Varius, aghast. It wasn’t until the man put an impatient hand on his shoulder and forced him to his knees that he snapped out of it.
“Come on now,” Varius growled. “Hurry up or you’ll be sucking my cock at the same time as well.”
Alfons felt as though he might choke to death on his own embarrassment. For the first time he wondered if Gerrik might have been right about Varius. Maybe he should have run when he had the chance.
Alfons opened the lube and liberally coated his hands with it. Without looking up at his new master, he reached for his own penis and began to stroke it, long and firm, just like he liked. He used the other hand to fondle his own balls as a way to stall for time.
Varius wanted him to... prepare himself. Of course he’d done it before. Every sex mage had to learn the basics of penetration, but... he’d always found the process vaguely humiliating, and he had mostly avoided doing it when he could.
And now he was supposed to do it in front of someone? And for what? Was Varius planning to take him, just like this?
He heard Varius sigh above him. “Shy, hm? Unfortunate, but not a deal-breaker. In some, that tension can be sublimated into desire. The knowledge of being watched, your own internal sense of shame, can be harnessed into power. But that can be a difficult road for a sex mage.” He sounded disappointed. “Perhaps you do not have what this takes after all. Lord knows you wouldn’t be the first student to drop out of my tutelage on day one.”
Alfons’s pride was stung. He’d had top marks in his discipline at school. His teachers had said his thesis enchantment was the best they’d ever seen. How dare this cranky old man underestimate him?
With determination, Alfons reached behind himself and eased two lubed fingers into his anus. The velvety softness of his own passage surprised him, as it always did. Penetrating himself this way was difficult on hands and knees, so he shifted until he was sitting with his hand underneath him, the other free to continue stroking his member.
Alfons worked the fingers inside himself methodically, stretching and moving the muscles until they began to relax. Focusing on it allowed him to distract himself from Varius’s dispassionate, inexorable gaze. When he was comfortable enough that the two fingers inside him slid in and out easily, Alfons shifted to add a third, widening the penetration.
Eventually he fell into a rhythm, hips rising with the stroke of his cock, then falling back onto the spear of his fingers. He kept his eyes closed, focusing on the pleasure, distancing himself from the reality of his surroundings. This was just another exercise for school, he told himself. Demonstrating his own pleasure. He could do this.
“Alright, good. Enough,” came Varius’s voice. Alfons opened his eyes, startled, pausing with his fingers knuckle-deep in his own anus. He’d almost forgotten the man was there.
“Hands and knees again,” Varius barked. Alfons hastened to obey, drawing his fingers out of himself and assuming the requested stance.
Varius walked around behind him and Alfons gasped when the man unceremoniously shoved four fingers up his ass, feeling around in idle exploration, testing the stretch of his anus and rectum. “I see,” Varius muttered. “Not bad, not bad. Although it would be good to know...”
“Ah!” Alfons cried out suddenly as the questing fingers rubbed ruthlessly up against his prostate. One of his hands faltered, dropping him to an elbow.
“Good,” remarked Varius. “Sensitive prostate. That will help.” All at once the fingers withdrew from his anus, leaving sparks of pleasure in their wake. “Now...”
Still dazed, Alfons only half noticed as Varius knelt beside him and reached under him for his crotch. His mentor’s fingers quickly found the gold band he’d slipped around Alfons’s genitals earlier, his fingertips sliding along the object in a strange, deliberate pattern, until-
A strange sensation overcame Alfons’s cock, like the prickling of a limb falling asleep. Alfons looked down just in time to see Varius withdraw his hand from Alfons’s lap, along with Alfons’s cock and balls.
Alfons gaped. A scream perched in his throat, but he had not the breath to let it out. The older mage hefted Alfons’s erect penis and dangling balls in his hands like a sex toy, completely detached from the rest of Alfons’s body. The golden band still encircled the base of the genitals.
In shock and panic, Alfons sat up and stared down at his crotch. The golden band was still there, as well, but now it was an empty ring between his legs where his cock should have been. The inside of the ring shimmered and glowed with a mottled red and gold light that swirled and billowed as he watched, like milk in dark coffee. Glancing back up, Alfons saw a matching swirl of light within the ring at the base of his now-detached genitals.
Varius smirked at Alfons’s obvious distress. “Do you like it?” he asked. “It’s one of my own inventions. Helpful in a wide variety of situations.” He stroked Alfons’s cock in his hands idly, almost thoughtlessly. Alfons shuddered. It wasn’t quite the same as normal. He could still feel the sensation of the hand on his cock, but it was muffled, as though through a glove.
“In addition to the obvious displacement functionality,” Varius continued, “the ring should prevent you from losing arousal or climaxing. It should be effective in training you to experience pleasure for an extended period of time. Now-”
Varius put a hand on Alfons’s back and unceremoniously shoved him back down. Not quick enough to catch himself on his hands, Alfons found himself on knees and elbows. His jaw clenched as Varius pumped his disembodied cock a few times, apparently just for good measure.
Then he felt Varius’s hands on his ass, and his eyes widened as he realized what was about to happen just as it began. Unseen fingers held his cheeks apart as Varius began to steadily slide Alfons’s own cock into his anus. Alfons’s breath caught in his throat as he was assaulted simultaneously by the twin pleasures of his passage being cleaved open, stretching wide as he was penetrated, and the tight pressure of that same passage strangling his cock, clenching down on it brutally.
A keening moan escaped Alfons as his cock was finally seated entirely inside him, his own balls resting gently against his ass cheeks. Grabbing the base, Varius thrust the disembodied genitals in and out of him a few times, idly fucking Alfons with his own penis. Alfons choked on his own spit as pleasure assaulted him from every direction. His balls trembled and clenched and Alfons knew he would have come were it not for the magic restraining him. As it was, the pleasure of the penetration was nearly blinding, unbearable in its intensity.
Varius shoved the cock deep inside him again, as deep as it would go, leaving him full. Then, to Alfons’s surprise and confusion, the man stepped back.
“Good,” said the mage, sounding satisfied. “Now, a fire spell please.” He lifted his own hand in demonstration, a flickering flame hovering above the center of his palm. It was the simplest possible spell for a sex mage, fire being the element most closely aligned with sex as a magical source.
Simple though it might be, Varius had never tried to do magic under such an assault of pleasure before. Trembling, he rose back into a sitting position, every tiny motion shifting the penetration and sending waves of twin sensation through him. He could barely focus his mind enough to register what he was doing. He held a hand out, palm-up, in a mirror of Varius’s own gesture, and tried to call flame to it.
What came was not a simple flickering candle flame, but an inferno. Fire roared to life in Alfons’s palm, then surrounded it, then licked its way up his arm all the way to his shoulder, engulfing him in flickering light and heat. As his own summon, the flame did not hurt Alfons in any way, but the sheer intensity of it frightened him. He’d never managed more than a palm-sized flame in the past, but now the fire was so powerful he could barely control it.
He tried to dismiss the summons, but the fire refused to quench. The flames receded down his arm, but they still surrounded his hand, blazing away. Alfons stared at it in shock, unsure what to do.
Varius finally quenched the flames himself, wrapping Alfons’s hand in a fire-proof towel and patting it down until the last of the fire flickered and died out. He smirked knowingly at Alfons’s expression.
“You see?” he said, his voice triumphant. “You have much to learn about pleasure, my boy, if you are strong enough.”
He handed Alfons his discarded clothes. “Now you may as well get settled in. My staff will inform you of mealtimes and other necessary routines for the household. I will expect you to report for training bright and early at 8 every morning.”
Alfons stared with a trickling horror at the clothes, then down at his own still-empty crotch. His weepingly erect penis quivered inside his passage. He knew that sex mages were encouraged to keep their orgasms few and far between, but surely- surely after something like this he would be allowed to-
“Well?” Varius said impatiently, before dropping the clothes in Alfons’s lap. “I have other things to do today. Namely organizing a lesson plan for my ungrateful apprentice for the next few weeks. Hurry and dress yourself.”
Alfons began tentatively to reach behind himself, every twist and minor movement still assaulting him with pleasure, only to have his hand slapped away.
“Don’t even think about removing that,” Varius said sternly. He reached down and gave Alfons’s balls an admonishing pat where they hung just below his asshole. “You came to train with the best, and so train you I will. If you can’t even get used to this, then you’re not going to last long here, boy.”
Alfons gaped up at his new master, clutching the clothes in his lap helplessly, and wondered what the hell he’d gotten himself into.